


Drunken Confessions

by simonlovelazy



Category: Stumptown (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Drinking, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Swearing, don't expect fifty shades of grey tho, fifty shades of grey get it, kay bye, this is the closest thing to smut i've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:42:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23304079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simonlovelazy/pseuds/simonlovelazy
Summary: There are things that Dex likes to keep to herself. Lots of things, in fact. But a proper mix of alcohol and a good friend who can listen would make anyone talk. And probably do some other stuff too.
Relationships: Grey McConnell & Dex Parios, Grey McConnell/Dex Parios
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	Drunken Confessions

**Author's Note:**

> This took me... 3 months.  
> At least I made it before the season finale, right?

Grey wakes up feeling dizzy, but overall fine, which can only mean he’s still to sober up. He always remembers what he did drunk. It’s either a blessing or a curse – depending how you look at it and what actually happened the night before.

This time though, he regrets nothing.

He rolls on to the side, well aware who’s lying next to him, but still eager to confirm it with his own two eyes. And yep, there she is, tangled in his comforter, with her belly exposed below the rolled up t-shirt. He’s almost thankful she isn’t naked.

He's watching her for a while, and in the soft light of the late morning, if he ignores her wild pose, she looks somewhat serene. Well, calmer than he’s used to seeing her.

Grey doesn’t really know what to do with himself now. Normally, he’d squish the girl and nap till the sun goes down or till he’s fully-functioning again – whatever comes first. Not an option with Dex. Not when he’s unsure where they’re at, and whether she remembers much from the night.

It’s probably for the best if she doesn’t wake up in his arms.

She frowns and murmurs something, her words muffled by the pillow, which prompts him to make a decision.

Breakfast.

Grey rubs his face and gets up.

But first groceries.

***

“Look who’s up,” Grey yells without turning away from the cooker. “How do you want your eggs?”

“What? No, don’t bother. I’ll grab something on my way.”

He shoots her a look. She’s bending over, trying to fish for her pants under the bed.

Aaaand butter is burning on the pan.

“C’mon Dex, don’t _déjà vu_ me. I’m not some John or a Mike you met in a bar. I’m your friend. So sit down and eat the damn egg.”

Dex doesn’t respond for a while, but when he looks up again after the butter situation is fixed, she’s sitting at the table. So far so good.

“Bloody Mary?” he offers to humor her.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

He smiles to himself turning to the fridge.

After he serves their breakfast and drinks, it’s all silent except their chewing, slurping and his loud thoughts.

“So...“

“Ahem. Yeah.”

* * *

**12 HOURS EARLIER**

* * *

It can be only one person at this hour. Sighing, he gives the last glance at the match and gets up from the couch. It’s not unlike her to appear at his doorstep, with furrowed brows and a half-empty bottle of beer in her hand.

“Great day, am I right?” she asks pushing next to him to throw herself down onto the couch.

“Can’t complain,” he says, sitting next to her. “What happened?”

“Well,” she starts and immediately pauses to take a gulp of beer, “Do you think I’m immature, reckless, and completely incapable of creating meaningful relationships?”

Grey grimaces. That’s a new one. “Where did you get that from?”

“Hoffman.”

“Okay, one moment.”

He fetches a bottle for himself, and that’s all the time Dex needs to claim the whole couch for herself. He pushes her legs off and squeezes next to her.

“What did he say, exactly?”

“Something like, ‘you’re reckless, immature, and completely incapable of creating meaningful relationships.’”

Grey takes a thoughtful gulp. “Reckless – one hundred percent true. Immature – really, depends on a day and probably whether Mercury is in retrogate or something. But you have good moments. Ansel would agree with me. About the last one – you have someone you can talk to after the bedtime, and this someone will even choose you over a very important match, which goes to show you have a way of entering people’s lives, even if only occasionally and on your own terms.”

She closes her eyes and breathes out slowly. “That’s – that’s not it. He meant _other_ relationships. Like him and me. Or me and anyone else I’ve been with. And I think he may be right. I tend to keep things physical and they never last long anyways.”

 _Oh_. Grey’s face all scrunches. “C’mon, since when do you care about anyone’s opinion? Just do your thing, and once you’re ready, you can decide if you want to make another step or not. It’s your life, and you don’t need Hoffman’s or anyone else’s approval.”

“I just – I see them together – Miles and Kara, and I’m so _pissed_. When I ran into them I was jealous, but not because he’d found someone else, but because he can just _be_ this person who asks his girlfriend to move in with him, and they go to the office parties together, and then he invites her to a dinner with his parents, and I... I’m not like that. I can’t be this person, I can’t just move on with my life, not when Benny...” her voice cracks and she pointedly stares at the screen. Commercials have just started. “There’s no next step for me, Grey. This is it.”

It vaguely reminds Grey of the conversation they had when they first met. Back when they decided to be friends. But he knows that since then, Dex has changed a lot. It’s only the fear that she’ll lose someone again that has never quite left her; she believes that she hurts everyone who gets too close, so she barricades herself. This way she’s the only one who gets hurt.

But he doesn’t know how to say it to her, how to explain it’s all bullshit. Or if he should speak about it at all.

“Will you believe me if I say that one day you’re going to be ok? Maybe sooner than you think.”

Dex snorts and attempts to drink from the empty bottle. She tips it upside down, looking at him meaningfully when a drop falls down onto the carpet.

“Just a sec.” Grey gets up, his knees cracking.

He takes his time in the kitchen.

Sure, it was to be expected that Hoffman’s new relationship would get on Dex’s nerves, but this... he hates to see her like that.

He glances into his fridge; not much is in there beside the light. And this situation requires heavier artillery. He comes back to Dex empty handed, but with a plan on his mind.

“Get moving, I ran out of booze.”

“Just what kind of bartender are you?”

***

“Did you make these burgers out of charcoal?” Dex scrunches her nose at the plate Grey has just passed her, but she puts her hands on the food nonetheless. She lounges next to where he’s preparing food with her legs swinging slowly over the floor. Talk about unsanitary. Luckily, there’s no inspections at 3 in the morning. 

“If I wanted to be a chef, I’d have opened a gourmet restaurant, not a bar. You can give it back if you don’t like it.”

Dex defensively pulls the burger close to her chest.

Grey puts the sad, withered leaf of lettuce in his own burger, and leans back on the counter next to her. They both face the overflowing with dirty dishes sink – the unfinished business of the last shift. He should probably talk to his employees tomorrow. They both stare at the heap for a good while without a word, deep in their thoughts, like it’s a Picasso, and they are art critics or something.

He takes his first bite and then a generous draught of beer immediately after to kill its taste. 

“Ansel says I need holidays,” Dex says.

“He’s damn right. Sign me up, too. We can sunbathe all day and drink these obnoxious colourful cocktails with those little...” He gestures for lack of the word.

She gives him a wry smile. “We could drive to Miami.”

“Drive!? Are you kidding me? You want to drive 3000 miles?”

“What? No! I want _you_ to drive.”

He scoffs, but plays along, “Deal, but you pay for the gas.”

They clink bottles to that.

“I mean, that’ll eat up all of my savings. So I’ll have to work on some case there, or we’ll have to sell handmade bracelets to pay for food and your umbrella drinks.”

He can see that; both of them looking like hoboes scorched in the Florida sun, selling garbage bracelets out of the trunk of her garbage car. She’d have these tiny braids in her hair, and he would walk barefoot. And let’s face it, they’d probably never not be high. That is when Ansel wouldn’t see.

Their laughter breezes through the empty bar. They chat more about silly stuff they could do once in Miami, but there’s something serious brewing at the pit of Grey’s stomach, and it isn’t just the burnt meat.

She must feel it too, because the Bad Alibi’s kitchen falls silent once more.

“Sometimes it feels like all that’s good is already behind me,” she says finally, but more to her bottle than to him.

“Isn’t _this_ kinda good too?” Grey asks, gesturing vaguely around the messy kitchen. As on cue, a bowl slides down the mountain of dirty dishes.

“If something is going too well, sooner or later I’ll find a way to fuck it up. At this point I’m just waiting for this to happen.”

“Listen. I don’t know what you were like in your happy days... with Benny.” He sees her swallow hard, but continues nonetheless, “And I can’t promise it will be the same way ever again. That _you_ will be the same. A part of you died with him on that day. But since we met six years ago, you’ve raised your brother, become a certified PI, slowed down with gambling–“

“Have I?”

“–okay, listen. The point is, maybe it’s not now, but at this rate, it’s gonna be great one day.”

“You’re great.” He adds hastily, surprising himself, but, after all, he’s just being honest and sort of drunk, too.

For a split second Dex looks at him with a mixture of intensity and vulnerability.

“Less talking, more drinking,” she announces, slipping off the metal surface and landing on the floor.

 _Dex always manages to slip away_ , he thinks dumbly, and so he finds himself following her and grabbing her arm before she disappeared in the door.

She turns around as dumbfounded as him. And a bit... expectant?

“Maybe we’ve had enough,” he says partially because he needs an excuse for what he’s just done, and partially because they’ve already followed the beer with whiskey and then toped it off with more beer.

Her surprise gives way to a sly smile he hasn’t seen on her in a hot minute. “I don’t think we did.”

Grey figures that he has successfully defused the tension, but then he doesn’t get to think of anything else, because Dex is all over him, sucking on his lip and pushing him back towards the counter.

The shock lasts no longer than a second. His mind is reeling, but his body reacts on its own; his tongue twirls with hers, arms crushing her in an embrace. But she doesn’t complain, only moans hungrily into his mouth, balling his shirt in her hand and hooking her other arm round his neck. They are impossibly close, to the point where it hurts, all the while trying to get even closer. His nose squishes against her flushed cheek, their teeth clank together, but none of them gives a damn.

Here and now, Dex wants him. Her movements are bolder than he remembers or has dared to imagine. He knows they probably shouldn’t, but fuck it, he wants this, he has always wanted her. It seems impossible that he has managed to go by all these years without touching her, so now he’s making up for the time when he didn’t hold her in his arms. She is delightful under his hands, and he can’t get enough of her. He wants more; he lets his hands slide down her back and cup her ass.

Dex pulls out from the kiss first, which only gives her more room to explore, her palm tracing down his chest – lower, and lower to finally pass the buckle of his belt. He’s been hard already, but when she flicks her index finger over the bulge, and raises her brow, he can’t take it anymore. Gripping her tighter, he raises her from the ground, and sits her at the edge of the counter.

There, they continue to make out, not more elegantly than before. The tiniest part of him absently registers their plates rattling somewhere on the side. Without breaking the contact, he tugs at her jacket, which has been already sliding down on its own, and lets it fall onto the ground. His hand finds its way under her thin t-shirt, pleasantly surprised on not finding any bra.

Meanwhile, Dex is working on the buttons of his shirt, her nimble fingers blind and forceful. She is too preoccupied with his mouth for her handiwork to be precise. Grey tugs and gently bites on the soft skin of her earlobe, slowly making his way towards her neck. A button pops and flies off into the air.

They break the kiss both chuckling and gasping for breath.

Dex tilts her head back, resting it against the wall. A chunk of hair gets stuck to her shiny with sweat forehead. Her heavy eyelids obscure hazy eyes, as she’s looking down at him.

“Fuck, you’re beautiful.”

As though he’s popped a bubble, her face tenses, a giddy smile leaving it without a trace. Lucidity returns to her sight, and it seems that only now she can really see who is in front of her.

“That’s enough,” Dex says hoarsely, straightening up.

Grey steps back. “If it’s because I’ve done something wrong or you–“

“No, it’s not that. Just... don’t.” Her voice hitches as she jumps off the counter.

“I’m sorry. For everything. I shouldn’t have... we just had one too many.”

“Will you just stop it?”

Grey huffs into the palms of his hands, suddenly very tired. “Ok. It was a long day; I’ll call you a cab. We can talk it through tomorrow. Or not. We can pretend it never happened, like the last time.”

Her eyes glaze over under the fluorescent lights. 

“All this–” she flings her hand, echoing his earlier words “– _is_ good. I don’t want to ruin it. And I don’t want to ruin _you_.”

“Listen to yourself! Even if you are the all-wrecking monster you think you are – which you aren’t – what do you want to break in me? I’m an ex-con with a long history of bad choices, relationships included. How could you do me any bad? What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

“You could leave.” Her voice seems exceptionally small after his outbreak.

His arms drop down. Ansel and Dex are all he has; no second thoughts about that. He’d throw everything he has into the fire for them if he had to, even Bad Alibi. He loves Dex in more than one way, and even if she can’t always be his the way she was tonight, he still wants her around. He’ll take as much as she is willing to give him, without being too greedy.

Somehow, he’s never considered that maybe it’s similar for her.

With all his thoughts tumbling down, he only manages to shake his head. “I could never leave.”

Suddenly, it feels so stupid that they see each other every day in the bar, do all kinds of favours and save each other’s asses more than once a week – all the while they’re scared the other could decide to leave.

At this point, the things unsaid have been more or less guessed by both of them. No need to hide anything now.

“I can’t introduce you to my parents, and maybe we shouldn’t go to the police department party, but so what?” He smiles lightly. “We can do it our way. We could make it work.”

“But if we fuck things up... can I still count on the drinks on the house?”

Now, that was his Dex.

“You have my word.”

He puts the back of his hand on her cheek, gazing at the well-known face. When he kisses her, their lips melt together in a familiar, but also excitingly new way. Sweet and purposeful. They don’t rush things, but they aren’t hesitant about what they want either.

“Maybe let’s wait with that cab,” Dex offers and he doesn’t argue.

* * *

**NOW**

* * *

Dex finally manages to swallow the last chunky bit of her cocktail. She slides off the stool and heads for the door avoiding Grey's eyes.

“So, that was fun. Talk to you later.”

He stands up rapidly. “Will ya? Why not talk now?”

She turns to him. Hands in her pockets do nothing in terms of a relaxed look. She’s an open book, and there are exclamation points all over the page.

“We were drunk.” She says finally.

“ _So_ drunk.” He chuckles.

“I was in a weird place yesterday.”

 _Uh huh._ He nods and joins her at the door. Folding his hands, he wonders if she’ll give him a platonic-friendship-with-occasional-benefits handshake. “And in what place are you now?”

“I...“

Dex looks like an animal caught in the headlights. Not a frightened deer, though, more like a bear that’s contemplating whether to run away or attack.

She tiptoes closer and gives him a peck to the very corner of his mouth. Her lips are chapped after the night of drinking, talking, and kissing.

“...I _will_ talk to you soon.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I got carried away and made a playlist for them 🙃
> 
> Check it out if you've got too much time 
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aekjGJzTUj3tTr7KyWDWB?si=cdDz8cKBTzy-Y7cu_dQJCQ


End file.
